Switching From Firefox to Vivaldi

For the time being, I am concluding my search for a new browser, that started one and a half months ago. Vivaldi has won the race, mainly because I respect and trust Bruce Lawson and I am excited to work with Chromium’s developer tools again. (I hope they are as good as I remember.) Downside: Chromium. Ugh! And Vivaldi is not 100% open source. But I am willing to compromise on that and give the browser that doesn’t spy on me, nor bakes in lame “AI” tooling, the benefit of the doubt.

Installation and Migration

Installation was a quick sudo pacman -Syu vivaldi on Arch and migration—only some bookmarks in my case—worked without any issues.

Settings

Vivaldi offers a plethora of settings and customization tweaks! Here’s what I did:

• Set Vivaldi as default browser and check on startup.
• It took some fiddling to tweak Vivaldi’s window controls for Sway (my Wayland compositor/window manager); enabling Use Native Window (disables window controls) and Open Settings in a Tab under Appearance worked for me.
• Set a colorful but calm theme: Painted Trans Flag.
• Recreate my minimal UI without panel and a minimal address and status bar.
• Show Bookmark Bar under Bookmarks.
• Set Startpage as my default search engine and add several custom search engines (e.g. MDN, dict.cc) with nickname (same as search keyword in Firefox).
• Enable Perform Gestures with Alt Key under Mouse to enable gestures with a trackpad.
• Disable ad blocking source Allow ads from our partners (support Vivaldi) under Privacy and Security > Tracker and Ad Blocking > Manage Sources button. I will find other ways to support Vivaldi.
• Login to my Proton account and enable Proton VPN for Vivaldi.
• Enable Save Files to Default Location Without Asking under Downloads.
• Turn off Mail, Calendar and Feeds under General. I’m not a fan of software that handles too much.

Extensions

I am using pass as my password manager and installed the fitting Chromium extension with sudo pacman -Syu browserpass browserpass-chromium. I prefer this over passff because of its slick UI and easy installation of the host script.

The only other essential extension is Wallabagger for my read-it-later needs. It took me a couple of retries to setup the extention and get Wallabag to serve a valid token. Saving/reading configuration from file made it work immediately.

Daily Use

It will take some time to get used to the different shortcuts, gestures, and bits and bobs that only constant use will uncover. So far I am really liking what I see!